Picus- Roman GodDeity"Picus Martius"

The Statue in Latinus's Hall

Virgil places Picus among the ancestral statues in King Latinus's palace at Laurentum. He stands in military dress, a horse-tamer, holding the curved augural staff called the lituus, his short cloak fastened with a golden brooch. He looks like a king. Virgil notes what he became: Circe, burning with desire, touched him with her golden wand, and the king of Latium turned into a bird with painted wings.

Through Picus ran the oldest royal blood in Italy. His son Faunus fathered Latinus, and when Latinus gave his daughter Lavinia to the Trojan exile Aeneas, the line of Picus merged with Troy's.

Circe in the Forest

Ovid tells the full story. Picus was hunting in the Laurentine woods when Circe saw him and wanted him. He was young and handsome enough to turn heads among the gods, but he was married to Canens, a nymph whose voice could soften stone. He told Circe he belonged to another. He told her twice.

Circe conjured a phantom boar and sent it crashing through the underbrush. Picus followed on horseback, deeper and deeper into trackless forest, until he was alone. She appeared again. He refused again. She struck him with her wand and spoke the words. Feathers burst from his arms. His cloak became plumage of purple and gold. His hands hardened into talons. The king shrank until he was a woodpecker hammering against the oaks he had once ruled.

His hunting companions found Circe instead. When they threatened her, she turned them into wolves and boars. Canens searched the countryside for six days and nights, calling his name, growing thinner with each step. On the banks of the Tiber she lay down and dissolved. Her body became mist. Her voice was the last thing to go. The Romans named the place after her.

Picus Martius

The woodpecker kept Picus's prophetic gift. Roman augurs watched it before campaigns and state decisions, reading its flight path and the direction of its call. They named it picus Martius, the woodpecker of Mars. Dionysius of Halicarnassus records that the bird fed Romulus and Remus alongside the she-wolf, coming to the twins in the wild, bringing food in its beak. A king turned woodpecker, tending the founders of a city that his own bloodline had made possible.